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Metahistory

The Long View: Spengler's Future

John wrote this book in 1992, based on the output of a program he wrote in BASIC to simulate repeated cycles of history. It is based on the work of both Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. John had a good sense of humor about the enterprise; he always took himself

The Long View: Millennials Rising

Strauss and Howe took a slightly different approach in this book from their previous works. This book focuses on one generation, the Millennials, born after 1982. This book in particular gives us an opportunity to revist Strauss and Howe's predictions nearly 15 years later. Pew Research has a

The Long View: The Fourth Turning

There was something magical and terrible about the end of the nineteenth century. The term coined to describe it, fin de siècle, itself accelerated the process already underway. Apocalyptic expectations can become feedback loops in certain situations. You might call it self-fulfilling prophecy, but in English this term carries a

The Long View: Constitution of the Ecumenical Empire

John was very interested in the form the future might take. He wrote a book that was his attempt to limn the future by means of a program he wrote in BASIC and the ideas of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. Like myself, John felt that the idea of cycles

The Long View 2002-01-21 Crusaders

One of the reasons I wanted to look back over John's writings 12 years later, is I'm curious how well his predictions turned out. One of John's intellectual interests was what he called macrohistory or metahistory, the study of models of history. In the

The Long View

The Long View

On May 30, 2012, my friend John J. Reilly passed from this vale of tears after a sudden illness. John and I never met in person, but we exchanged emails and forum posts for nearly ten years, so I feel that I knew him in a way. John was one

A golden age of engineering

In a Twitter exchange with John D. Cook, John mentioned to me that he "heard it said we live in a golden age of engineering and a dark age of science". That really got me thinking: do we live in a golden age of engineering and a dark